Lyrical and Critical Essays Quotes

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“From time to time I meet people who live among riches I cannot even imagine. I still have to make an effort to realize that others can feel envious of such wealth. A long time ago, I once lived a whole week luxuriating in all the goods of this world: we slept without a roof, on a beach, I lived on fruit, and spent half my days alone in the water. I learned something then that has always made me react to the signs of comfort or of a well-appointed house with irony, impatience, and sometimes anger. Although I live without worrying about tomorrow now, and therefore count myself among the privileged, I don't know how to own things. What I do have, which always comes to me without my asking for it, I can't seem to keep. Less from extravagance, I think, than from another kind of parsimony: I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in daily fidelity.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“To correct a natural indifference, I was placed halfway between poverty and the sun. Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Here I understand what is meant by glory: the right to love without limits.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“For the Greeks, values existed a priori and marked out the exact limits of every action. Modern philosophy places its values at the completion of action. They are not, but they become, and we shall know them completely only at the end of history. When they disappear, limits vanish as well, and since ideas differ as to what these values will be, since there is no struggle which, unhindered by these same values, does not extend indefinitely, we are now witnessing the Messianic forces confronting one another, their clamors merging in the shock of empires. Excess is a fire, according to Heraclitus. The fire is gaining ground; Nietzsche has been overtaken. It is no longer with hammer blows but with cannon shots that Europe philosophizes.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“There is no love of life without despair of life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“A writer writes to a great extent to be read (let's admire those who say they don't, but not believe them).”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Yes, I am present. And what strikes me at this moment is that I can go no further – like a man sentenced to life imprisonment, to whom everything is present. But also like a man who know that tomorrow will be the same, and every other day. For when a man becomes conscious of what he is now, it means he expects nothing further.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“I would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or one Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young writers.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“If I try to reach myself, it is at the bottom of this light. And if I try to understand and savor this delicate taste which reveals the secret of the world, it is myself that I find at the depth of the universe. Myself, that is to say, this extreme emotion which frees me from my surroundings.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries grey and poverty unbearable.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Young women looking after a children's summer camp, the ice-cream vendor's horn (his cart is a gondola on wheels, pushed by two handles), the displays of fruit, red melons with black pips, translucent, sticky grapes -- all are props for the person who can no longer be alone. [1] But the cicadas' tender and bitter chirping, the perfume of water and stars one meets on September nights, the scented paths among the lentisks and the rosebushes, all these are signs of love for the person forced to be alone. [2]

[1] That is to say, everybody.
[2] That is to say, everybody.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“None of this fits together? How very true! A woman you leave behind to go to the movies, an old man to whom you have stopped listening, a death that redeems nothing, and then, on the other hand, the whole radiance of the world. What difference does it make if you accept everything? Here are three destinies, different and yet alike. Death for us all, but his own death to each. After all, the sun still warms our bones for us.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“Naturally, a writer has some joys he lives for and that do satisfy him fully. But for me, these come at the moment of conception, at the instant when the subject reveals itself, when the articulation of the work sketches itself out before the suddenly heightened awareness, at those delicious moments when imagination and intelligence are fused. These moments disappear as they are born. What is left is the execution, that is to say, a long period of hard work.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“every time it seems to me that I’ve grasped the deep meaning of the world, it is its simplicity that always overwhelms me.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“I have a liking for energy and conquests. But I soon tire of what I have obtained. This is my great weakness.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“And as far as he was concerned, he needed to be listened to in order to believe in his life.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat—hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone).”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“I’ve learned less about people, since their destiny interests me more than their reactions, and destinies tend to repeat each other.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“The young don’t know that experience is a defeat and that we must lose everything in order to win a little knowledge.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude that gives everything back its value. At a certain level of wealth, the heavens themselves and the star-filled night are nature’s riches.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays